The Bermuda Humpback Whale Project has completed its photo-ID cataloguing of the island’s greatest return visitors for 2011 — documenting at least 150 of the magnificent migratory animals in the island’s waters between February and May.

Headed by conservationist and filmmaker Andrew Stevenson, the Humpback Whale Project — founded in 2007 — researches and collect visual and acoustics data on the great sea creatures.

“I haven’t counted the exact number of individual humpback whale fluke IDs we have obtained this season but it is well over 150,” said Mr. Stevenson. “That is about the same as our previous record two years ago when we obtained 158 individual fluke IDs.

“Keep in mind the total number of fluke IDs obtained in Bermuda by marine scientists from 1968 to 2007, when I started my project, was 146.”

“That brings the total of Bermuda fluke IDs in the past five seasons to well over 500 individual animals out of 7,000 humpbacks that have been identified in the North Atlantic.”

“The key to our studies of humpbacks is individual photo-identification,” said Mr. Stevenson. “Each humpback has a unique pigmentation pattern on the underside of its tail flukes — some are mostly black, some are mostly white, and many have a mixture of black and white.”

Photos of these patterns, plus various nicks and scars on the tail, make a photograph of the flukes — taken from behind when the whale dives and lifts its tail – the equivalent of a person’s passport photo.

By examining these photo IDs, Mr. Stevenson and other researchers can determine how many different whales are in Bermuda waters, how many return here each spring, and what other areas they visit.

Mr. Stevenson said many of the humpbacks his team have sighted more than once in Bermuda have not been seen anywhere else.

But he added the Bermuda Humpback Project had matched about a third of this season’s IDs to the Provincetown Centre for Coastal Studies catalogue in Massachusetts — a major whale conservation and rescue centre — and the Allied Whale’s North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalogue at the University of the Atlantic, Maine.

“We’ve also made some additional matches with the Newfoundland catalogue in St. Pierre-et-Miquelon,” he said.

About 20 percent of this season’s fluke IDs are re-sightings to whale fluke IDs obtained here in Bermuda over the last five years.